Dorothy Molter : Sole Resident of Wilderness Preserve Dies

The woman who for more than five decades lived in isolated splendor on three minute Minnesota islands but insisted that she “was never lonely, just alone,” is dead.

Dorothy Molter, the last permanent resident of the million-acre Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness Area was 79.

She was found dead Thursday in the log cabin that she had called home since 1930, the year she first accompanied her father to a remote fishing camp 40 miles northeast of Ely, Minn., on the Canadian border.

During all those years, she was without electricity, and her only warmth during the desolate winter was the wood that she managed to forage in more temperate days. Her transportation in summer was canoe and in winter snowshoes and snowmobiles.

But, as she told The Times in a 1980 interview, she was never lonely even though the Saturday Evening Post once called her “The Loneliest Woman in America.”

Brought News

What the magazine failed to realize, she said, was that while her only companions from October to May were an occasional snowmobiler bringing supplies, during the summer more than 7,000 canoeists each year brought her news of the world and purchased supplies from her rudimentary store on the shores of Knife Lake. Many, more importantly, were in need of her medical skills.

A registered nurse, she had treated hundreds if not thousands of visitors to Minnesota’s canoe country, where planes are forbidden to land on the lakes. Most were victims of canoes that overturned in the rapids or were injured scrambling around on the sharp rocks that dot the waters.

The overturned canoes were a plus for her, because she was able to restock those voyagers from her clapboard store, which offered dehydrated food, canoe paddles, canned meat, sugar, salt, axes and, her specialty, homemade root beer.

A sign on the side of one of her tents read, “The Brew That Made Knife Lake Famous.” Since 1952, she had been brewing it eight gallons at a time with water from the pristine lake.

Nursing School

Miss Molter, who grew up in the Chicago area, graduated from a nursing school there. She first came to Knife Lake in June, 1930, when she was 23, to fish with her parents. They stayed at a small resort owned by Bill Berglund, a retired logger.

Miss Molter had been unable to find a job as a nurse in Depression-era Chicago, so she agreed to stay on to help Berglund.

“I figured, heck, it beats sitting by the phone at home. It was a real adventure for a young woman,” she said in a 1980 interview with the Associated Press.

When Berglund died in 1948, he willed the three islands to Miss Molter, who never married, and she stayed on alone, chopping wood for the barrel stove that heated her cabin and providing food for the ducks, mink, martin, moose and deer that surrounded her primitive encampment.

“My animal friends visit me every day,” she told The Times. “I cut wood from fallen trees and carry the logs back on a sled pulled by my snowmobile. I don’t have time to get lonely.”

Game Birds

After the U.S. Forest Service took over the islands in 1967, she was made a volunteer worker and allowed to live on her three Isles of Pine, the largest of which is nine acres and the other two half an acre each. There she continued to fish through the ice in winter and shoot partridge and other game birds for her food.

But she will be the last human allowed to live permanently in that pristine country because it now reverts completely to the government.

Over the years, she did make occasional forays back to Chicago to renew her nursing license but never wanted to live anywhere but the wilderness.

“This is my home, and I think this is where I’ll die,” she would say.